How To Use An Android Tablet – The Basics And Getting Started

Basics Of The Operating System – Tutorial For Android

Do you want to know how to use an Android tablet? In this first video in a series of Android tablet tutorials, I’m going to walk you through the very basics of using an Android tablet.

Android 4.0 is also known as Android Ice Cream Sandwich. It’s Google’s Android operating system for smartphones and mobile tablets. If you are running a different version of Android, the same approach can be taken for using Android 3 Honeycomb tablet PCs. If you’ve got an Android tablet with an earlier version of Android some of the screens may differ but the principles remain broadly the same.

This video showing how to use an Android tablet covers:

Unlocking an Android tablet PC

How to change wallpaper background on an Android tablet PC

Discovering the Android home screen desktops and how to find your way around them

I’ll show you around the Android tablet home screen. This includes where you can find a quick way to search Google, how to locate apps and widgets on Android.

Using the software buttons – the back button, home button, and view latest open apps (multitasking)

Navigating through the web, YouTube, Camera, Gallery, email, Music etc. shortcuts on Android.

The notification area – where you can see as new notifications such as apps downloading, new emails arriving etc.

How to change settings in Android to lock the orientation of the screen

Navigating your Android tablet with a single tap to select apps and long taps to set wallpaper.

How to set-up short cuts in Android so you can configure your home screens/desktops

Using pinching to zoom-in and zoom-out of images in Android..

The Android keyboard and how you use it to search the web via the quick Google search feature.

Note: The “Market” app in this video has now been updated to “Play” – Google Play is Google’s repository for downloading apps, ebooks, and movie rentals direct to your tablet.

How To Use An Android Tablet Video Transcription

Hi and welcome to the video. You’re looking at Android on a tablet PC. The Android operating system is Google’s operating system and it’s recently been evolved to work much more smoothly on tablet PCs.

Now in this video we’re going to look at the very basics of using Android on a tablet PC.

So first up, this is the lock screen and you’ll see a lock icon here. Now if I press on that and hold down, I’m on the touch screen and I drag it across to this lock, that is unlocked, it will automatically snap to it and when I release and get’s me straight into the tablet PC. You may have noticed that there was a camera icon also there, which we’ll look at in a separate video on how you can access directly to the camera application.

So this is the Android central home screen. Now I’m just going to quickly show you how you can change the wallpapers here because then that will make it a bit easier for you to see as I’m navigating Android. So I’ve just pressed and held down on the main home screen here and I’ve got an option to choose wallpaper from a gallery, photo, live wallpaper or standard wallpaper.

Now if I click on standard wallpaper, I can navigate to different kinds of wallpapers and when we’re talking about wallpapers here, we’re talking basically about the background and the colors that you can use. Now there’s a few different options here, if I set one as my wallpaper here, this is just a kind of countryside scene. I’m actually going to navigate to the live wallpapers as these are a bit more interesting for higher-end PCs. So let’s take one and have a look at it, it’s kind of like a moving spiral-type effect. And that works quite nicely to be able to show you Android.

Now the operating system itself it’s already made up to start off with five home screens. So along the top here you can notice five dots in a row and the middle dot currently has a box around it. So that’s the central home screen. Now you have five home screens and if I navigate left you can see that the box moves along one and we get into a different home screen. And here I’m navigating to the left, I get another box moving across, and I’m actually at the far end here so if I try to navigate further that way, it’s not allowing me to do so. If I navigate back to the central home screen and then go to the right, now you can see I’m accessing other types of home screens here. And again, the far right, you’ve got the box around that far right dot, and then we’re back here.

So, if I go to the central one here—and I’ll just show you around some of the icons and what’s available on the screen here—so you’ve got a kind of a Google logo at the top here at the top here with a little microphone next to it, and that Google there will allow you to click and immediately navigate to a Google search on the web and also some previous searches. I’m going to jump back to the home screen and I’ll show you how I did that in just a moment. The little icon here which shows a kind of microphone allows you to actually speak into the microphone of the tablet PC and navigate in that way, rather than typing something here.

On the far right here we have six boxes in two sets of three. So if I click on that, that actually navigates you straight to your kind of apps screen. It lists all your applications you have available to you. You can also get widgets from here, which are kind of little small widgets that you can put on those home screens where you can quickly access information.

Now I’m going to go back again to that home screen and there’s a little widget I’ve got set up here that actually shows you location and weather. Over here, we can see the date and also the number of emails that I’ve got outstanding in my inbox.

Now further down here we’ve got a few other buttons so this is something I tapped on slightly earlier. So we’ve got a back button here which allows us to go back to whatever you’ve previously accessed.

You’ve also got the home button, which always brings you back to this main central home screen. So for example, if I’m in the far home screen and I tap that, we go back to the central one. If I’m in the applications and the widgets and I want to get back to that home screen, I just press that. So that’s just a quick and easy way to always find you way back to this central home screen.

Now also here we have a kind of a third icon which is kind of like a few boxes on top of each other, which show you the kind of open apps at that stage. If you’ve got a number of apps open, this is a quick and easy way to navigate to them. So I previously was doing a search, so that’s available to me. I was looking at settings and stuff like that, so that’s available to me. Similarly if I opened an application, let’s say I went to the Android Market, let’s go back to the home and you can see that’s now available within this and these are pretty easy to open and close and I’ll show you that in a later video.

So that’s those kind of software buttons there, but also down at the bottom you’ve got a number of short cuts. Now currently here I’ve got a browser and the YouTube application, the camera application, gallery application, a note taking application that comes with this Asus tablet, a music application, the Android Market and also Gmail. And these kind kinds of things—and you’ll notice them on other home screens—are just quick ways of jumping to applications within your tablet.

Now you’ll notice I’ve got a number of widgets already set up, this is a bookmarks widget, and you can actually configure some of these by holding down on them to be actually slightly smaller, slightly bigger, but I’ll go into more detail on that in a separate video.

And finally down at the bottom here, we have the kind of notification area and the settings where you can see settings such as if you’re downloading applications, new email, etc. Now I won’t go into this in too much detail but there’s much more information here for a separate video.

Now one other thing for finding your way around this tablet is that it reorientates itself. Now currently I’ve actually been into the settings and I’ve changed the settings so that the auto-rotate screen is on. And what this allows you to do is to rotate the screen around and it reorientates itself to the portrait or landscape mode you’re in at that stage.

Now if you don’t like that and you actually want it so you have a bit more consistency and that it sticks in the orientation that you like, if you jump to the settings—and again I’ll show you this in a bit more detail separately—you can actually turn off that auto-rotate screen by going into the display element. You may well come into this on the wi-fi side of things, that’s usually the default thing that happens when you get into settings. If you click down onto display, you find auto-rotate screen—there’s a little tick next to that—let’s untick that so it disappears. Now, when we go back to the home screen, if we actually rotate doesn’t reorientitates itself. So let’s pop that back again and that will work smoothly.

Other ways to navigate this tablet—and I’ve been showing you some of those as I’ve been going along—are a number of different sort of things you can do. Now, you’ve got a single tap, which effectively allows you to select a desired item, such as activating an application. So say, for example, a single tap, tap on the YouTube application and it opens. Tap on the home button and it navigates you straight back to that. So a single tap is just for selecting something.

Now you can also long press. I showed you this originally when I was selecting wallpapers. Long press basically means tapping on the screen and holding down, and in that case, some wallpaper came out of that—and I’m just tapping to get out of that kind of mini-menu there – but similarly, a good thing with a long tap, particularly on Android you can use it to configure those home screens and put new short cuts on them. So say, for example, I’ve got an Amazon Kindle application here. If I long tap and hold on that, and I hold it down I can now drag it to one of the home screens. You’ll notice that as I drag it and push it to a new home screen it drops there. And again, if I wanted to change the kind of configuration of how I’ve set this up, I can literally tap on something, hold it down and drag it here. So it’s a drag-and-drop type functionality. So that’s long pressing.

Now another option you have is pinching. Now pinching is using a couple of fingers to zoom in and out of photos or web pages etc. So let’s take a very simple picture I took of just a plant here. You can zoom in very easily, push two fingers away from each other or zoom back in again by using that pinch motion. And now I’ll zip back to the home screen.

The finally one is kind of like flipping, where you can just flip between screens with just a single swipe type motion with your finger.

One other input method is actually using the software keyboard. So say, for example, you can just type something in. Now this is the Google search that I was showing you earlier on. Say I wanted to jump to the Yahoo home page—let’s do that—that’s Yahoo Mail, you can just type it in using that keyboard that comes up, and it’s quite easy to type, just as you’d expect to get with any type of QWERTY keyboard that you’d be used to typing with just like a physical keyboard.

So that’s it in terms of getting around the tablet. So those are the kind of basics and in future videos we’ll have a look at detail and help you find your way around your Android tablet PC.

Lucky you….not everyone who is first confronted with a device like this is able to understand it within a couple of minutes. And as many tablets do not come with English instructions, videos like this are invaluable for inexperienced users.

i got a similar model with keyboard and was surprised I could nt just start typing… as I was strugling to get on wi fi. but typing just meant entering into a google box … the software for typing ie word processing just was nt there

I thought this was a very easy to understand basic intro to the Android OS for a tablet. Much more informative than the manuel I got with my tablet. I look forward to seeing your other videos. Easy to understand, informative and invaluable for inexperienced Android Tablet users. Thank you. I really enjoyed the info you provided!!!!!

i have superpad6 flytouch6 android 4.0 blocked in the start up menu and its system does not start and stops at the ANDROID BRAND name. i tried the soft and hard reset buttons many times and changed many buttons but no result at all.i always get the following message: system “android.phone.com is stopped”i believe that there is a solution but i do not how to resolve the problem. many told me this need a USB RESET or USB FORMATTING.what is the problem exactly?what should i do?

To install flash player go to setting then security then check unknown sources!go to browser type flash player archive and download flash player 4.0 or whatever your device uses.click on flash…apk go to homeho to the square with dots then go to downloadstap flash player and tap install and you’re done!

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the instructions that come with the tablet are un intelligible . this surely makes the thing unusable . i have spent all day trying to fathom this gadget out- I am not a gadget person and unfamiliar with touch screens. People who write in structiions hav eno idea how a total ignoramouis comes to a tablet- even this video takes certain knowledge for granted.

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I just bought 8 of these for my grandchildren. One arrived shattered and one is finiky. doesnt want to do what you touch it to do. BUT one problem I have with ALL of them is there is NO place to download apps. No app store. No playstore. No itunes. No Google apps. Nothing nowhere. AND my home screens do NOT have those icons across the bottom to start. I have to open the apps and choose one of those (minimal apps). How do I download apps in the Trio Stealth Pro 9.7. I have to wrap them for Christmas soon. HELP !!!

hi how are u happy new year i have a question for you i buy a polaroid 9 inch tablet and i have a problem with the wifi i have to stend in front of the modem to have any signal cuz if a go farther the signal is lost what i can do to solve the problem any avise

What are the steps to transfer photos from Android Nextbook Tablet to Notebook Computer. Should I use USB or Micro SD chip or ?????? whatever. I have at least 24 photos I want to transfer to computer so I can print them or save to DVD.

one tiny question: is it posible to get rid of YouTube ads in the Samsung Galaxy tab 4 Android 10.1″?The Tablet comes with a YouTube App installed and all of a sudden while you are watching a video an annoying disrupting full screen ad comes right in very loud, and I am trying to stop this. Have any ideas on how to do this? Thanks.